I am grateful for Gatrell's painstaking
summary of my book, which I think readers will find useful. All
the same, I sense a mismatch between my intentions and his perceptions.
He generously praises me as a 'consummate storyteller' and implies
that narrative is the book's main strength, while on theory it
is relatively weak. If that is the case, I confess that I shall
be disappointed. What I tried to do in this book was to provide
a new framework for an overall interpretation of Russian history,
at least since the sixteenth century. Relatively new only, of course:
no one can be (or should be) completely original in enterprises
of this kind, and I have learnt much from previous historians,
including Pipes and Billington, both of whom Gatrell mentions.
I think those debts are clear from the citations in the end-notes.
But the synthesis I have put together derives from some thirty
years of teaching, reading and thinking about Russia and its strange
history, and from sensing that something crucially important was
not being articulated in more than passing fashion by the existing
standard works. The result, I believe, is a polemical - and perhaps
one-sided - work, buttressed by a lot of empirical evidence. For
me, that is to say, the overall thesis is more important than the
narrative.

What I am asserting is that 'autocracy' and 'backwardness',
both of which are almost invariably put forward as permanent and
unchangeable features of Russia, are in fact not primary, but are
themselves a product of the chronic conflict between people (or
potential nation) and empire. Gatrell would have liked me to 'make
greater use of theoretical approaches to social and national identity',
but I did in fact dedicate the introduction to surveying the theories
of nationhood which have become current in the last twenty or thirty
years, and to relating them to Russia. I even rushed in where angels
fear to tread and tried to define the concept of 'nation', which
is further than most social scientists will go. Perhaps indeed
I should have integrated these concepts 'more closely into the
complex web of historical narrative', but in my experience, where
theory and narrative are too closely intertwined, the result tends
to be distortion and over determination. All the same, I believe
sufficient of the preliminary theoretical framework remains in
the main passages of exposition.

Gatrell reproaches me for not having any clear
sense of what Russian national identity might have been without
empire, or at any rate of only putting forward 'slippery kinds
of self-definition'. In fact I set out at some length how Metropolitan
Makarii tried in the mid-sixteenth century to provide Russians
with a national identity. At its centre was the idea of Moscow
as the inheritor of a religious mission derived from Byzantium
Moscow the Third Rome in fact. It was an eschatological vision,
and also an exclusive and isolationist one, which rendered it ultimately
inappropriate for an empire which had to both incorporate and have
contact with many diverse peoples. But while it lasted, it was
propounded every day in the churches, and there is every reason
to suppose that it had resonance among ordinary people. It was
repudiated, however, by the imperial state and the church in
the mid-seventeenth century, generating a lasting schism within
the Russian national consciousness.

I tried also to give precise content to the 'slippery'
Russian concept of 'communal solidarity' in the institution of
'mutual responsibility', which had existed embryonically from earliest
times, but which was reinforced in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, as it was especially convenient to an imperial state
which wished to tax its citizens heavily and to recruit huge armies
from among them. Most of Part 3, Chapter 3, on the peasantry, is
devoted to explaining the implications of 'mutual responsibility'
for the peasants' customs and way of life, and in showing how it
inclined them to a view of politics, law and social cohesion which
was incompatible with that held in St Petersburg or the numerous
manor houses of European Russia. That incompatibility I see as
a fundamental cause of the 1917 revolution

I readily accept that I should have written about
most of the things Gatrell complains I have omitted, but then the
book would have been a thousand pages long instead of just over
five hundred! I constantly struggled with the temptation to try
and write a complete history of Russia. But, although the theme
of 'people and empire' is pretty pervasive, not quite everything
in Russian history is relevant. For example I deliberately omitted
any serious discussion of gender issues, for which Gatrell berates
me.

However, I especially regret not having said
anything about music - and here Gatrell is quite right: I would
have given a lot of attention to Musorgskii. I have a feeling that
in Boris Godunov and especially Khovanshchina he
was trying to say something about the way in which the state overshadowed
the people and caused ancient Russian traditions to be trodden
under foot. But in the end I decided it was better to concentrate
on literature, the most important branch of culture in projecting
Russian national identity, and to say something connected and reasonably
fully developed about that, rather than to give scrappy accounts
of all fields of culture.

Gatrell makes a telling point in suggesting that
the people of some other European countries were also slow to develop
a sense of national identity. French peasants 'became Frenchmen'
only in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as Eugene
Weber has shown. It may indeed be true that Russian peasants were
only a few decades behind them in that respect. But those few decades
were crucial, as can be seen from a simple comparison of what happened
in the two countries in 1917. In France there was a major mutiny
in the army, but the generals were eventually able to restore order
by, among other things, appealing to a shared sense of national
identity. In Russia the attempt to do something similar did not
work, because Russian peasant-soldiers were less susceptible to
that kind of appeal. The result was that a revolution which started
in the towns gained its depth in the countryside. Class struggle
was important in Russia, but it was part of something even bigger:
peasants and workers felt that nobility and bourgeoisie (or burzhui,
as they liked indiscriminately and contemptuously to dub them)
were not only exploiting them but alien to them. Disraeli may have
felt that Britain was 'two nations', but all the same nineteenth
century English workers expressed their discontent through the
Chartist movement, which aimed to get them votes in parliamentary
elections. In other words, English workers observed the same basic
ground-rules as their social superiors; Russian peasants did not.
That is a crucial difference.

Contrary to what Gatrell suggests, I have tried
to argue the case for supposing that imperial expansion and administration
obstructed economic growth in two ways: (i) by imposing very heavy
levels of taxation on peasants and townsfolk - a persistent theme
throughout the book, and (ii) by distracting landowners from the
efficient stewardship of their estates: I suggest on pp. 162-4
that they were run essentially as overgrown peasant holdings, with
little attempt at modernisation. This inefficient use of resources,
I suggest, seriously delayed the application of capital to either
the modernisation of agriculture or the expansion of industry.
The argument is not new, but I have tried to link it to the theme
of empire. I do not deny that Russia's economy has usually been
backward, but the real question is why all attempts to modernise
it end up by replicating that backwardness. I am suggesting that
the real reason is the burden of empire.

Some fascinating questions remain. I believe
Russia had little choice but to build an empire - or to become
a tiny part of someone else's - with all the consequences I set
out. Although my diagnosis of Russia's difficulties has much in
common with Solzhenitsyn's, I do not share Solzhenitsyn's view
that there was an obvious alternative: namely to renounce empire
and concentrate on national revival. At least, not until the present.
But today, we are genuinely in a new situation. There is no major
geo-strategic threat to Russia, such as requires it to remain an
empire, still less to try to recreate a former empire. Russia for
the first time in its history has the luxury of being able to concentrate
on becoming a nation-state of the kind which makes all its citizens
feel they have a stake in it. It certainly hasn't succeeded in
achieving that yet, but if my main thesis is correct, it has the
chance to do so now, and thereby to banish for good the dual spectres
of autocracy and backwardness.